Dear freshman,

You probably shouldn’t be here at Emory.

No, it’s not the Ebola. It’s the dazed, confused look in your eye, the wonder and bewilderment in that naive grin. You’re having too much fun. You’re making us upperclassmen feel like callous scrooges reflecting on our innocent childhood. You make us look so old and mature. You make us look like we have life figured out.

It’s not that enjoying college is a bad thing. It’s not that your sweet, uncorrupted spirits are loathsome or unwanted. You just don’t belong in college.

Let me explain.

If you don’t know why you are here, then you probably shouldn’t be here. I’m not talking about reasons like “Emory [was] a top 20 school,” or “Emory has a great visual arts department.” You need to know why you’re here, where Emory is taking you, what Emory will do to you and to your thinking and to your future. Sixty thousand dollars a year is an investment, and if you don’t know what you are investing in, you probably shouldn’t be paying it.

Wait as I count on my hands and toes – and then borrow a friend’s – all the times my professors, parents and mentors told me that college is a place where you figure things out, where not everything has to make sense right away. Your college years are also “the best years of your life,” according to most.

I think our society profoundly misunderstands the heart and soul of a college education.

Marketing, a stigma on blue-collar jobs (like the surprisingly lucrative occupation of a plumber) and an unfortunate buildup of social momentum have all combined to make college another high school, another chunk of schooling that you have to complete just to look your peers in the eye. You don’t take a gap year between eighth and ninth grade. That’s just absurd, unheard of. The notion of a gap year between high school and college now faces a similar fate.

In my senior year of high school, I told my teachers I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. Sure I had some vague ideas, but nothing certain. Their responses were unanimous: go to college. “But wait, I don’t even know if I can afford – ” I’m cut off. “Go, go to college.” So I did. I took over five thousand dollars of loans and put my family through a financial wormhole to make it happen, but I went to college. Has it been worth it? It’s hard to tell. I wanted to take a gap year so I could investigate the possibilities. But the advice I kept finding myself faced with was the same: go to college, study what you love, and if you love what you study enough, you’ll be able to make money. I wasn’t seeing where that lined up with the financial investment I was having to make. But surely, seeing as my advisers were older and wiser, they knew what to do. So I went to college without coming up for air.

This past summer I heard a rising freshman tell me, “I’m a physics major. I don’t know, I just took a class in high school and really thought it was neat.” On top of everything, she was her high school’s valedictorian. Nevertheless, she was looking at everything the wrong way around. It doesn’t make an ounce of sense to study something for four years and then try to find a job that roughly corresponds. If it’s a career you’re talking about, that’s 40 years of work determined by four years of study. That kind of thinking is completely backward; the four years of study should be determined by the 40-year career. Otherwise, you’re risking a miserable life after college, even if your college years are in fact “the best of your life.”

Because we are so hurriedly ushered into college, we wind up building a staircase without even thinking about where it’s headed. When you finally do find out, you might have to tear it down and start all over.

 

There are two essential approaches to college: the foundational and the facilitative. The foundational approach is the traditional liberal arts education which has almost gone extinct. Sure, hundreds of colleges offer so-called liberal arts degrees, but they have sorely deviated from the purpose of the liberal arts: to raise educated, critically minded, well-versed citizens who can think, initiate and appreciate. The tenure system, the commercialization of education and a decreasingly critically-minded society have all contributed to the liberal arts’ downfall. If you want, you can get a liberal arts degree just by spouting your feelings to your professors who are too scared to lose their jobs by pissing off the $240,000 that is their student.

The second approach to college, the facilitative, is more utilitarian: I want x job, I need y degree. This is also known as the pre-professional track. It involves knowing where you want to go and using education to get there. Although adherents to this approach would certainly benefit from a traditional liberal arts education, it is by no means a bad system. It is vital that students with this approach have a strong sense of the field their education is leading them toward. Too many medical school graduates realize that stress, blood and sickness is not for them when they start their residency.

To summarize, let me reiterate: if you don’t know why you’re here and what you’re doing and where you’re going, you probably shouldn’t be here. Instead, you could take the time to figure out how the next 40 years of your professional career will be best spent before diving into it blindfolded. Or you could work a nine-to-five job for minimum wage to incite some motivation to find something better. You can also always join the army.​

– By Jon Warkentine

 

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The Emory Wheel was founded in 1919 and is currently the only independent, student-run newspaper of Emory University. The Wheel publishes weekly on Wednesdays during the academic year, except during University holidays and scheduled publication intermissions.

The Wheel is financially and editorially independent from the University. All of its content is generated by the Wheel’s more than 100 student staff members and contributing writers, and its printing costs are covered by profits from self-generated advertising sales.